What Makes a Street 'Private'? And Why Does San Francisco Have So Many?

San Francisco has about 1,000 miles of streets, and Victoria Eng’s isn’t particularly notable. But when she Googled her Duboce Triangle avenue, she learned something curious:

“It popped up on a list as an intersection of a privately owned street nearby.”

She sees this private street all the time. “It has a fancy sign that actually says the name of it,” she says.

It’s off 14th Street near Belcher Street. There, a pink Victorian and a beige Victorian stand side-by-side, but instead of having a space between them they’re connected on the second and third levels. At the street level there’s a passageway through to the back with a red gate at the entrance. Above it, a sign reads “Boynton Court.”

“Every time I walk by it, I just now wonder about this mysterious courtyard-slash-private street,” Eng says. “This has been haunting me ever since.”

So she tapped Bay Curious for help. “Why are there private streets at all?” she wrote. “Who owns these streets and why would someone want to own one of these streets?”

Private streets 101

There are 288 private streets in the city, according to San Francisco Public Works Director of Policy and Communications Rachel Gordon. Most of them are unglamorous access roads used for commercial purposes. That might mean a little road that leads to a warehouse or a business park, or it could mean a long driveway leading up to an institution like a college or hospital. The property owners maintain these roads, not the city.

There are also some residential private streets, usually owned by a group of property owners who live on the street. These are much less common, Gordon says, but she wasn’t able to provide an estimate of how many there are today.

Another category of streets that aren’t maintained by the city are referred to as “unaccepted” streets. There are 148 miles of them in San Francisco, Gordon says. These streets aren’t privately owned, but they don’t meet the city’s standards for a legitimate street.

Glen Park’s unpaved alleyways are a good example. “Those streets are very delightful to walk through,” Gordon says. “A lot of times the adjacent property owners will plant flowers or put up sculptures there.”

To be “accepted” by the city, a street has to be at least 40 feet wide and have a curb and sidewalk, among other things. If a street meets those standards, the city will take responsibility for cleaning it, filling potholes and doing all the other maintenance required. Unaccepted streets aren’t privately owned, but Gordon says they do end up being privately maintained, usually by the fronting property owners, if anybody takes care of them at all.

Usually people can freely use private driveways or access roads owned by businesses or institutions that are open to the public.

According to a San Francisco Police Department spokesperson, emergency services have access to both public and private streets and the department responds the same way regardless of who owns the street.

Unaccepted streets are public, too.

But residential private streets are a different story.

The Presidio Terrace debacle

The city’s most notorious private street saga involves Presidio Terrace. One of the wealthiest areas in the city, Presidio Terrace is both a neighborhood and the oval-shaped street that runs through it. It’s a gated community of multimillion-dollar houses, and its common areas, including its street, are owned and maintained by the neighborhood’s homeowners association.

Presidio Terrace was built on the idea of exclusion. It was created in 1905 and explicitly advertised as a community for “Caucasians.” A racial covenant barring non-white folks from living there was one of the key selling points in an early brochure for the development. The covenant was invalidated in 1948 when the Supreme Court made the enforcement of those kinds of restrictions illegal — but the gate is still there.

In 2015, the city put the street up for sale because the homeowners association hadn’t paid taxes on it for decades. They’d apparently forgotten to provide an updated billing address, so they defaulted on a $14 annual property tax. By 2015, they owed the city about $1,000 in outstanding fees.

At the time, San Jose couple Michael Cheng and Tina Lam were looking for real estate investments.

“This parcel came up in San Francisco. It had a great address,” Cheng recalls. So they bid on it and won it for just over $90,000.

But they had no idea what they’d just bought.

“Because when we were looking at it, it was really confusing,” he says. “It said it was part of a street and part of the HOA, and it was a vacant land parcel.”

Cheng says they had to go to City Hall and dig through title records to figure it out. And when they finally did, they weren’t sure what to do with the street.

“We thought it was pretty cool to have, just for the sake of having something in San Francisco,” Cheng says, “But it was also not a great property that we could build on.”

Cheng and his wife were considering charging for parking spaces — either charging the residents or charging the public for parking access. They figured that would make enough money to cover the taxes and maintenance.

Cheng says they also considered holding events there. “That’s what people with private streets could do: They can hold community activities without blocking off city streets. So we could do like a fair or farmers market,” he says. “I wanted to make it open to the public because it’s a great-looking street, but nobody can see it.”

That’s not how it worked out. When Presidio Terrace homeowners found out their street had been sold, they took legal action against the city and Cheng and Lam and started pressuring city leaders.

The HOA had a lobbyist working for them, and Dianne Feinstein, a former Presidio Terrace resident, wrote to city leaders on their behalf. All this got a ton of media attention.

In the end, the supervisors sided with the homeowners and returned the street to them.

“I got my dose of reality that that’s kind of how the wealthy had things,” Cheng says. “They could buy their way and get the things that they want.”

The city refunded the couple the $90,000. Cheng tried suing the city without success, but by 2019 he says he and his wife were too worn out to keep fighting.

The couple didn’t buy any more streets, but Cheng says people did start trying to sell them odd bits and pieces of peninsula pavement.

“We came across a very interesting segment of the population who does this kind of stuff,” Cheng says. “Apparently we weren’t the craziest ones buying streets. We just happened to get ourselves caught in this mess.”

So, what’s up with Boynton Court?

The Presidio Terrace drama is part of what inspired our question-asker, Victoria Eng. Without that story in the back of her mind, she says she probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought when she learned Boynton Court was privately owned.

This private “street” is really a walkway. If you can convince a gracious neighbor to let you in, you’ll find it runs between the Victorians and opens into a small courtyard with another building behind it facing the courtyard.

Tim Dunn has been living in one of the units in that building for almost 16 years — longer than any of his neighbors, he says.

Dunn says Boynton Court was built in 1893 along with the Victorians in front of the courtyard that face 14th Street.

“The original person who built them was a butcher on Polk Street,” Dunn says. “He built them all as rental apartments.”

So who owns the court today? According to Dunn, it’s shared by the neighbors.

“This owner owns half of that passageway, this owner owns half,” he says, motioning toward the two street-facing Victorians and the gate between them. “Then we all have easements that we can use it. It’s all privately owned different parcels.”

Sometimes figuring out how to handle maintenance costs is a pain, Dunn says, but they work it out — and they make sure to pay their tax bill.